I had to bike through the hood yesterday to meet a client. Cruising the bike, the hood creeps up on you slowely. It’s a very gradual thing that takes over all your senses. The smell is the worst. Especially as you bike into it from the river. Like a hurricane you can almost pinpoint exactly when you’ve reached the epicenter of the hood just by the foul smell that almost knocks you off your bike. Almost as obvious is the ever increasing number of obstacles in the street that you need to negotiate as you get closer to the epicenter, and not until you start to dodge the hunkered broken bodies of last nights all night drink, are you at the center. You’re getting close when you see the half crazed man desperately trying to control and trim his exploding boardwalk grass with a rusty pitching wedge. Comedy. I also noticed a store with a red and yellow hand painted sign above two small frosted glass doors that advertised “start your own internet business”. Having some time and feeling entrepreneurial, I checked out this young guys store. I told him I had some experience with the “internet” and I was looking to start my own business cause I wanted to get P.A.I.D. I think he was on to me though and wouldn’t really reveal what he was trying to sell. I seriously think he was selling AOL CD’s that he had stolen from the post office and other places where you can get all the AOL CD’s you want for free. So I guess I won’t be starting my internet business anytime soon. Bummer. Later, after my meeting and still in the hood, some guy drove painfully close to me in his white pick-up and then squirted me with windshield whipper fluid that he had earlier configured to shoot off to the side of his truck. He was laughing and knee slapping as he drove off. I was covered in a smelly blue fluid. Denver.

Last night I began packing for my big move into Minneapolis. Saint Paul has been good to me. My old corner is a graceful mix of trustfund kids, blacks, chicanos, dirty people, clean people and broken people all coexisting in a mellow little community. Nobody really bothers anybody and that’s just fine by me. My bike commute is going to be drastically shorter now that I’ve gone Uptown. I’m going to have to go buy a lot more black turtlenecks.

My new Favorite logo is fairchild semiconductor

So much working. Not enough time for posting and bantering. Got my first homer hanky since 1987 last friday, right before watching Radke and the Twinkies close down the Oakland A’s winning streak. I know I swore off baseball last week but that will have to be postponed until after the Twins win the world series. P.S. The metrodome is the worst building in the midwest.

Two men were talking in the bathroom Friday, one guy asked the other what he was going to do over the weekend and the other guy responded, “I’m going to do whatever my wife tells me to do”.

Monday Night Football must be on somewhere right now because I can hear John Maddon squaking from one of my neighbors windows.

Great Article by Herbert Muschamp in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday about reimagining the architecture of ground zero. Some really inventive stuff is proposed. Most of the buildings showcase a desire for mixed use, community, and diversity. Linda Roy’s housing development is especially intriguing and beautiful.

I would love to see a vision like this for my own city and hope that it doesn’t take a national tragedy to inspire people to reimagine their surroundings.

I’m reimagining my own town right now with the help of KATO Japanese trains. They have the coolest miniature models for constructing your own pre-godzilla strike township. Check out the Denny’s Restaurant you can get. I’m getting the Decals too. There are so many uses for these.

Bike commuting doesn’t get better than mornings like this one. Beautiful weather and some decent strangeness to keep me amused. A squirrel decided to race me for a block. It just started bolting down the sidewalk when I passed him/her. It won. Four kids who were waiting for their bus at an intersection were all sitting with their backs to eachother playing little handheld video games. Kinda depressing. But Then I thought maybe they were all networked and were playing together, or maybe their parents had bought them all wireless devices and they decided to be geeky at the bus stop and instant message eachother. I felt better thinking that. A road crew was laying piping hot new pavement on Summit Ave, and a clueless biker decided to ride into it. He got stuck and his tires melted. The biker was trying to gracefully lean/fall/stretch to the curb without putting a foot down on the steamy pavement and finally collapsed like a raggedy-ann doll barely escaping some serious burns. Finally, I thought for about a half-mile about what my life would be like if I was a professor of physics at one of the small colleges around here. In my mind it was a pretty good life.

I’ve learned many great lesson biking this summer. One is that no matter how fast you go there is always someone who wants to go faster. My legs have remembered some muscle and I can cruise at a good clip. I pass a lot of people but there is always someone who blows right by me and my rabbit status goes right back to tortoise. Sometimes, for no real reason, I try and justify this in my mind, like, “yeah well she’s probably just starting her journey and I’m already seven miles into mine.” or, “I got this huge bag with a heavy laptop in it and he’s got nothing weighing him down but that dorky spandex biker gear”. It seems silly that I would do this but I do.

Biking also gives you time to really appreciate the fading images.

I read this great article last year, that I wish I could find now but I can’t. The main thesis of the article was that the health of the Trucking Industry is the best indicator of how our economy is doing. Basically, if trucking is doing well then manufacturing is doing well and consumer spending is on the up.

Interesting then that the market yesterday had the worse close since September 11th on the breaking news that consolidated freight, the third biggest trucking company, had filed for bankrupcy.

Also interesting is that the site for the upcoming Truck World 2002 Show claim that:

“By the time of the Truck World 2002 Show (September 26-28) most forecasters expect that the North American Economy will be in a full and robust recovery. The trucking industry is a leading economic indicator and current signals reflect this positive outlook. By the fall of 2002, we anticipate that the industry will be initiating postponed expenditures. You cannot afford to miss Canada’s Premier Trucking Event!”

Iconfactory offers a really nifty app called Candy Bar for swapping out icons in OSX Jaguar. I’m rocking the Pixelbabies Icons right now and diggin’ em.

Now that France has gone down to a four day week, I think it’s high time we did the same. I got so much done over the last few days, I feel like i’ve had a two week vacation. Really just that extra day for getting all the weekend errands done was key.

I spent the better part of Friday getting all pretty with Aqua and installing the feline version of OSX, and so far I am very pleased. I am very happy to kick Microsoft Entourage out the house as my email program. That shit was fucking up my computer good. Aqua is very addictive and I could look at it all day, which is good, cause I do. For some reason I was under the assumption that Apple’s calendaring app ical was going to be buddled with Jaguar but it wasn’t and now I guess I have to wait till they release it sometime in September. So Since I’m getting rid of Entourage and iCal hasn’t dropped yet I have no calendaring app. So don’t expect me to show up on time to anything for awhile. Perhaps with OSX’s developer tools, I can build my own damn calendar.

The big joy of Jaguar is definitely the new Sherlock, which offers an interesting alternative to a web browser for getting times for movies, yellow page listings, ebay scores, etc. Very slick and very fast. The biggest disappointment is iphoto, which is rudimentary, slow and altogether a pain in my ass.

So yeah, I got all that techno nerdy stuff done Friday and part of Saturday and then I was able to really get into the weekend. The missis and I decided it was time to get into the car and go check out some towns that we had never been to before but knew were crawling with dusty antiques and funky old records that people had abandoned for years. After stocking up on some Devils Food Cookies we headed south east and ended up in the downtown metropolis of Red Wing, home of fine Red Wing Pottery. We immediately made the biggest score of the trip. Beautiful Crate art. Some stunning pieces were scavenged from the crates. I really dig these. Each one has a unique type face and illustration, a utilitarian concept and, colorful design.

Other cities that were conquered and pillaged of their dusty booty included, Lake City, Historic Wabasha (I swear every city in Wisconsin has the honor of being “historic”), Urne, Eau Claire, Altunna, Chippewa Falls and Hudson. We stayed overnight in Eau Claire which was pretty entertaining and tried Sunday morning to go on the Leinenkugel’s Brewery Tour but were sad to find it closed for the season. It had closed August 31st, which was the day before. Denver.

Returning home, I bought some new kicks a new CD and watched the magnificent Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God. All in all a full weekend. It makes me think about what life would be like if everyone (or at least me) worked a four day week.

Finally, as of today, I am over baseball. Once and forever. The industry hates their fans. So I will no longer be one.

Also, Kelly would like you to know that her new favorite word for a total cutie is, “Foxy McFoxerson” (from Annie). Check out Foxy’s cousin Drunky McDrunkerson at MTV’s VMAs. Can you think of any other variations on this theme?

Photographs everywhere! Zeitgeist photographer Ryan McGinley has dropped his first book available at index magazine. Check out some of his snaps here. The one’s of the band mum are great.

I went to the Walker’s One Planet Under a Groove, a loose collection of contemporary art inspired by Hip Hop’s back catalog. The highlight of the whole show was definitely Adrien Piper, with funk dance lessons from 1983, a great documentary on how to dance funk.

It was the first time I was able to catch a glimpse of Ricky Powell’s new photography book The Rickford Files. A great collection of old school snaps. Ricky makes Puff Daddy’s parties seem weak.

Ouch. Late night at Kinko’s. Mad printing fury of brochures and materials went late into the night. Thank god for Kinkos and their 24 hour policy. And god bless Ben, the Kinkos helper for taking time out between tracks of his “new” Gorillaz CD to help me negotiate some tricky maneuvers on their Macintosh. And while I’m thanking god – thanks for Whitey’s World Famous Saloon for serving food till midnight and Heinekens long after that.

This morning I am feeling the crunch of the baseball strike. I think I would feel very different about this tragic situation if our Minnesota Twins were not sitting on the top of the American League Central, pounding their chests, and looking down at all the sub-par teams that have bigger bank accounts and have players who do badder drugs and have bigger arrest records. But I think after I get over the fact that I wont be able to see my team fight in some well deserved playoffs, I wont shed too many tears for the loss of this baseball season. This whole strike thing has dragged on longer than that stupid American Idol show and I’m sick of both. Erase them from my memory. If you care, here is a good article on the position of both the owners and players. Better yet, here are some great strike inspired sign from fans who may not be fans much longer.

In other sports and politics news, I have decided that my vote for Minnesota Governor will be determined by each candidate answering to the following question: how many skateparks do you plan to build during your term as governor and in what neighborhoods will you build them? I’m thinking the scope of that question covers so much ground and such a diverse spectrum of issues that I will be able to cast my vote with pride and vigor when I have assessed all the candidates answers.

Dreamland Skateparks, a skatepark design company actually mentions on their homepage “skatepark ROI” in all seriousness. The times they are a changing.

Finally someone named a band after Ferris Bueller’s school principle Rooney. And one of the members of the band is the kid brother of Jason Shwartman. That family has some musical ambition.

Fair day was a blast. It really takes almost a whole day to do the fair proper. And it will probably take a full day of biking to work off the Buckets o’ French Fries and other greasy assorted edibles that were consumed at every turn. My favorite thing at the fair was Lillian. Lillian is a 91 year old lady who has a little table in the agricultural building and sits there from noon to 5:30pm and makes crop art from seeds. She makes things like, We Are the World posters, where you have to wonder what seed is pink enough to make Cyndi Laupers hair stand out. No problem for Lillian though – she’s a master in her field – one seed and one drop of Elmer’s glue at a time. Over the years Lillian has amassed quite a collection of celebrity crop art. Bill Cosbys up on her wall. So is David Letterman. She was hard at work on some gigantic bird when I was watching. She was in a zone so I didn’t bother her.

The other highlight was definitely flying over Machinery Hill in the micro gondola and getting to see aerial shots of all the latest shiny new farm equipment and then flying over a crazy new addition to the fair called “Big Boy Sandbox”, where anyone with a valid drivers license can not only operate a BobCat but can race other contestants to see who can build like the biggest pile of dirt in the shortest amount of time. Ahhh…Minnesota.

Readers of these narrow pages and the comrades who watch me devour huge plates of greasy fries at local midnight eateries are well aware of my excessive use of the condiment known as Heinz Ketchup. If there were a help group for abusers of this tempting tomato treat, I’m sure that there would have been an intervention long ago and I would now, after years of shock therapy, scream in fright at the site of a 20 oz bottle of spreadable, dippable love. But there isn’t and so I go on in a cloud of bliss, drain whole bottles in one sitting and befuddle the help when I request a second bottle of ketchup when I haven’t even ordered my first beer.

I am always pleased to try just about any variety of new Heinz Ketchup product that comes down the marketing pipe from the wizards at H.Q. (I still have a bottle of wild purple ketchup in my fridge) and was no less enthusiastic when I discovered that Heinz was releasing an organic ketchup. Finally, I can shop the organic co-op just down the block and buy everything I need for a good grill out and not have to make a separate trip to another store just to buy ketchup. That organic Muir Glen brand posing in the condiment isle as ketchup is a cruel joke on the intelligence and taste buds of all and should be eradicated from the consumer landscape with the speed of economics.

It’s interesting to note that the Heinz organic ketchup is a whole lot thicker and perhaps chunkier then its un-orgaganic and less viscous older brother, which makes me wonder if a) there actually is no real difference between Heinz regular and organic ketchup and that the wizards at Heinz inc. think that organic just means thicker and with more “real” whole looking chunks (New Heinz Organic Ketchup! Now with bigger and and thicker chunks! 25% more organic than the next leading brand of organic ketchup), and b) how many French fries do I need to dip at one time in order to provide a sufficient barge for which to transport the heftiness of the organics. These are the questions that keep me awake at night.

Speaking of condiments and greasy food, tomorrow I am heading to the Minnesota State Fair. I’ve kinda avoided it for the past few years. The last time I went, I ended up drinking on and off stage with the Goo Goo Dolls bassist, Robby, who was actually a pioneer band weblogger back in the day. I also got him to admit that they hadn’t made a decent album since “hold me up”. But that whole night ended in barnyard craziness and I was barely capable of finding my way back off the fairgrounds. I do remember stumbling into a new modern RV show and quickly running into one, shutting and bolting the door, and falling asleep.

Tomorrow at the fair the mood should be calmer. I am most looking forward to the livestock judging. Especially the Swine Spotted Hogs event that will be held in the Swine barn. I will try and take a picture of the winner and post it Wednesday for all to enjoy. Also on the docket tomorrow is the Celebrity Animal Calling. With local newscasters calling their favorite animals. Take note of the cool wood type poster designed for the fair by HartungKemp, with wood type borrowed from my typography teacher, Bill Moran’s archives.